EXHIBITIONS: Erik Kessels is "Loving Your Pictures"

Published on April 13, 2006.

Loving Your Bunny
Through May 28 at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands, Erik Kessels of Amsterdam agency KesselsKramer is presenting
other peoples' photographs. Titled "Loving Your Pictures," the show features images collected and edited by Kessels, who has amassed an archive of "found" photography. "These photographs, which the original makers did not intend as works of art, take on new meanings as they are exhibited in a new context within the museum," he says. "These photographic series will give the audience a chance to create order from chaos, to make a story out of fragments of information, while also allowing them to look at their own photographs with new eyes." Kessels' wide-ranging collection includes German police uniform catalogs from the '70s; images pulled from blogs, such as this shot of "the popular Japanese rabbit Oolong, whose life was documented online"; and discarded photographs that were "rescued for viewing" in response to an ad requesting unwanted snapshots. "In these images we see accidents made by the camera or photographer that result in interesting objects apart from their intended purpose," he says. Some pictures from the show are seen in the PDF. The remarkable shot of the deer is part of a series of hidden-camera wilderness images in which the shutter is triggered by a motion detector. See www.kesselskramer.com and www.centraalmuseum.nl for more.